CTI: Crime Team Investigation

[Ian Aloser]

Jack Putter ,
Thanks so much for this elaborate explanation!
I can hardly believe how much work you put into this post alone!
You really have put up something special, I wish I had just a few
percent of your narrative talent.
One last question : How did you come to ALFRED Einstein instead of Albert?
I laughed out loudly, because Alfred is a rather rare german forename in these times.
And I still blush when I think of my near-perfect pentagram leading to Sheldonville :-)))))
So thank you once more for this great piece of entertainment!!!!!!!

[Laura Hunt]

Thank you for the incredibly detailed explanation, Jack! I loved reading how you came up with all those names, references and winks because that's the way my brain tends to work too. I'm humbled that you staged this whole thing for us, and glad that you had fun following our crazy hunches as we ran from one place to another like headless chickens

Reading the reasoning behind some of the clues, I have to admit that some of them were REALLY obscure, like the one about the 26 pieces of silver. Man. You clearly overestimated us!

The way you planned out the different outcomes according to which officers we sent to each scene also had my jaw hitting the floor. Now THAT is dedication. Chapeau.

(Regarding the ROT-1 puzzle, in case you're curious, what caught my eye almost immediately was seeing "MM" twice, plus some other double letters like FF and SS. This told me that it had to be a substitution cipher, not some words hidden among a bunch of random letters. And when I landed on BMM I was like um... that could be "ALL" in ROT-1. And it was )

[Cassiebsg]

Cool, thanks for all the hard work! 

[heltenjon]

My, you don't disappoint, Jack! That's an incredibly detailed post, dare I say in SK's spirit.

(Now, constant reader, SK himself has taken to including these details and hints in his books, where he will tell where an idea came from, or where they will be linked by something or someone.)

Way before social media really became a thing, I behaved like alt.books.stephen-king was my social medium of choice. You could say this case was a trip down memory lane for me. Jack, if you haven't checked out the Castle Rock TV series, you will probably like it. Especially season two, about Annie Wilkes at a younger age.

Thanks for including everything I wondered about and then some.  I was wondering about the combination of officers a lot. Great to see how it could have been, as this game can't be replayed. It's incredibly hard to get the difficulty just right when you make these kinds of puzzles, but I'd say you managed to make them varied and hard enough. Great use of hints in-game through the captain! That's how I got the phone number puzzle.

I'll also compliment all the little interactions with the team. Good to know that my donut discount was put to good use. And also thank you for those details you didn't put in there, but which were there nonetheless. The perfect pentagram and the clue to Salzburg stand out to me like they could have been correct. Amazing.

[JackPutter]

Thank you all for such lovely comments! This was my main project over the lockdown period, so that probably explains why I put so much effort into it! I'm very glad you all think it paid off.

Ian Aloser - Alfred Einstein came from me thinking, "If a smart person was pretending to be someone who was dumb but trying to appear smart, what would they do? Well, they'd claim to be smarter than Einstein but get the name wrong!"

Laura Hunt - I realised pretty quickly that the Judas puzzle was too out-there, that's why I added the other clue. I decided to leave the 26 pieces of silver bit in there though because that's the kind of puzzle I like. (Thank you for the tip about recognising substitution ciphers, I'm sure that will be very helpful to me in my future puzzle solving endeavours!)

Cassiebsg - Thank you very much for playing! I am so happy that you enjoyed it!

heltenjon - I'm glad that the subject of this game matched your interests so well! I wasn't sure if there would even be any Stephen King fans playing, and I'm very happy that I managed to include enough references and easter eggs to give you a nice nostalgia hit. Shortly after beginning this game I actually started watching season one of Castle Rock, which is when I realised that Sheriff Pangborn is a much bigger figure in Stephen King lore than I had thought! I enjoyed season one of the show, and season two is definitely on my list! I am also amazed by some of the coincidences that occurred during the course of your investigation... The pentagram and the Salzburg situation both completely amazed me! 100% unintentional. Absolutely fascinating how those things can arise.

[Laura Hunt]

I liked the first season of Castle Rock a lot, although I found the ending to be a bit of a cheap "haha gotcha!". I haven't watched the whole of season 2, though. I found it slowwww and a bit boring tbh, and I dropped out after 2 or 3 episodes. Maybe I'll give it another go sometime.

I used to be a huge Stephen King fan back in the day (== the 80s), but I stopped reading him after Needful Things came out, as I felt that his books were just getting more and more bloated for the sake of it (I absolutely hated Tommyknockers), and that he was phoning it in by that point. I'm sure he's written a lot of good stuff after that, but I've never really felt like picking up any of his books since then. So yeah, this means I haven't read any Stephen King in... 30 years